Edmund Charles Blunden
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Passionate I look for their dumb story still,
And the charred stub outspeaks the living tree.
Edmund Charles Blunden (November 1, 1896 – January 20, 1974) was an English poet, author and critic. Although not one of the top trio of English World War I writers, his works exerted important influence.
Quotes[edit]
- At Quincy's moat the squandering village ends,
And there in the almshouse dwell the dearest friends
Of all the village, two old dames that cling
As close as any trueloves in the spring.- Poem Almswomen
- Cricket to us, like you, was more than play,
It was a worship in the summer sun.- Poem Pride of the Village (1925)
The Survival (1921)[edit]
- To-day's house makes to-morrow’s road;
I knew these heaps of stone
When they were walls of grace and might,
The country’s honour, art’s delight
That over fountain'd silence show'd
Fame's final bastion.
On the thin breastwork flutter the grey rags,
The very books I read are there—and I
Dead as the men I loved, wait while life drags.
Festubert, 1916 (1921)[edit]
- Tired with dull grief, grown old before my day,
I sit in solitude and only hear
Long silent laughters, murmurings of dismay,
The lost intensities of hope and fear;
In those old marshes yet the rifles lie,
On the thin breastwork flutter the grey rags,
The very books I read are there—and I
Dead as the men I loved, wait while life drags.
- Its wounded length from those sad streets of war
Into green places here, that were my own;
But now what once was mine is mine no more,
I seek such neighbours here and I find none.
With such strong gentleness and tireless will
Those ruined houses seared themselves in me,
Passionate I look for their dumb story still,
And the charred stub outspeaks the living tree.
Cricket Country (1944)[edit]
- Australia once produced poets who were English poets a little out of touch; now she has her own; and O'Reilly with ball in hand is quite the parallel of an Australian poet, territorially distinct in rhythm, passion, scheme and transition.
- Chapter VII, "Card of the Match"
Quotes about Edmund Blunden[edit]
- It [Undertones of War] is beautifully written and rich in literary references. More significantly, it is a lament for the destruction of the French and Belgian countryside, and by implication, the threat to natural peace and beauty everywhere by the savage, impersonal menace of war. As Paul Fussell has perceptively written, for Blunden the countryside was not merely beautiful; it was as magical and as precious to him as English literature: "For it to be brutally torn up by shells is a scandal close to murder". It is essentially in this poignant sense of natural destruction and needless waste (including the loss of animals and old buildings as well as people) that Blunden could be construed as "anti-war". He had little sense of political causation or strategic factors, seeing the conflict rather in terms of a natural disaster such as an earthquake or the effects of a drastic climate change.
- Brian Bond, Survivors of a Kind: Memoirs of the Western Front (2008), pp. 35-36
- An extended pastoral elegy in prose is what Blunden's Undertones of War (1928) may be called. Whatever it is (G. S. Fraser once called it "the best war poem" and printed some of it as free verse in the London Magazine), no one disagrees that together with Sassoon's and Graves's "memoirs" it is one of the permanent works engendered by memoirs of the war. Its distinction derives in large part from the delicacy with which it deploys the properties of traditional English literary pastoral in the service of the gentlest (though not always the gentlest) kind of irony. If Spenser or Milton or Gray or Collins or Clare or the author of Thyrsis had fought in the Great War, any one of them could have used Blunden's final image to end a memoir of it. With a due sense of theatrical costume and an awareness of a young subaltern's loving responsibility for the flock under his care, Blunden brings Undertones of War to a close by calling himself "a harmless young shepherd in a soldier's coat" (314). That characterization is English to a fault, and beautiful.
- Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), pp. 254-255
